By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow, Weatherbell co-chief Meteorologist
This is August and the east coast season peaks in September with activity in October. August systems often provide just a hint at what is to follow. This year after the winter record cold and snows, spring heavy rains and record flood and tornadoes, a 60 to 100 year drought in Texas and nearby areas. A year without a summer in the Northwest and brutal heat in the south central and at times most other areas of the central and east. Now comes the hurricane season. La Ninas often do far more damage from El Ninos. This was a super La Nina, the second strongest in history (either behind 1917/18 if you use the atmospheric measure, 1955/56 if you use the Multivariate ENSO Index of NOAA CDC Klaus Wolter).
We have already had 5 named storms...nothing significant. But the season really doesn’t kick in most years until mid August. NWS NHC has upgraded their forecast for the hurricane season. Here is the normal hurricane tracks from August to October.
The warm Atlantic and cold Pacific usually mean an east coast landfall. The analogs and model forecasts suggests the trough which has been off the east coast moves inland far enough to threaten trouble for the east coast. These troughs amplify than lift out leaving a weakness a storm in the waters off the east coast can penetrate. The Carolinas and the coast further north including New Jersey and New York are vulnerable. This region is is overdue. This summer was a lot like the 1954 and 1955 summers.
It was estimated to be a category 3 or even 4 when it brushed New Jersey before making landfall on New York CIty 1930 UTC on September 3. This makes it the only major hurricane to directly hit the city since 1800. The late great weather historian David Ludlum summarized it below and enlarged PDF here.
The hurricane produced a storm surge of 13 feet (4 m) in only one hour at Battery Park. Manhattan Island was completely flooded to Canal Street. The flooding would have been much worse, had the hurricane not struck at low tide However, few deaths were reported in the city, since the flooding affected neighborhoods much less populated than today. Strong waves and winds blew many ships ashore along Long Island. One ship sank, killing 17 people.
Please come to WeatherBell and see the daily posts that Joe Bastardi and I provide all through the hurricane and winter seasons ahead. If you have energy, agriculture or retail interests, we provide special services to those markets.
Scientific misconduct almost certainly demonstrable
You may have forgotten about it but one of the early stimuli that energized the recent wave of hysteria about the so-called “global warming” was a claimed observation of four dead polar bears floating on the sea after a thunderstorm in September 2004 - exactly when TRF was getting started.
The main relevant articles ultimately appeared in 2005 and 2006:
Potential effects of diminished sea ice on open-water swimming, mortality, and distribution of polar bears during fall in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea (2005)
Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea (2006)
The authors of the 2006 article, Charles Monnett (lead author of both articles) and Jeffrey S. Gleason, have de facto claimed that 5/6 of a group of polar bears died in a 16-year period and it’s surely due to global warming and it’s gonna get worse.
As the media - see e.g. AP and CBS news - just figured out, Charles Monnett, employed by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy, Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, was put on leave until the verdict about the investigation of his “integrity issues”. Obama administration officials are behind the investigation: they confiscated Monnett’s hard drives and notebooks, among other possible proofs. Gleason, the second author in both papers, has told the investigators that none of the polar bears in either article had anything real to do with global warming (and they haven’t even mentioned the term global warming) and Monnett has added this spin to his interpretations (which has surely sweetened his life until 2011, I add).
Polar bears have developed modern techniques to adapt to global warming.
As you may determine if you study some literature, Charles Monnett is the world’s main scientist behind the idea that polar bears are increasingly drowning because of global warming - something that added a couple of scenes to Al Gore’s movie (which was a part of the investigation as well), too. Until these days, he de facto controlled the U.S. Arctic Wildlife research and decided about $50 million of its funding (see the AP report).
Arctic sea ice as of yesterday, via The Cryosphere Today. It’s Summer and the ice is receding, reaching the minimum in mid September. Some polar bears may have chosen the pack ice for the Summer which makes it impossible - as the gap has grown - to reach e.g. North Asia. If they got stuck on a shrinking area of pack ice near the pole and if the sea ice went to zero, they would be in trouble but be sure it won’t happen in 2011.
He was told the charges. They are related to his polar bear research and chances are 50-50 that they can either demonstrate that this whole research has been fraudulent or the same thing holds for the “climate change” interpretations of it. See Where are all the drowning polar bears? at World Climate Report (2008) for more details why Monnett’s results never looked right.
It seems increasingly likely that the research backing the global warming doctrine is corrupt at every conceivable level. We can’t know what the final verdict of the investigation will be - but I am pleasantly surprised that the Obama administration dares to investigate at all when the target is a top doomsday-believing would-be defender of a climatic holy cow, I mean the holy polar bear.
Just a trivial point: many people, including myself, tended to think in the past that the polar bears live near the North Pole where the ice has been diminishing in recent 3 decades (and doing many other things before that) which would clearly affect them. If you have these tendencies, you should check the map of their habitat. Of course that the normal range is on the firm land, near the Arctic Circle, far enough from the pole, and the experienced animals probably know damn well that the pack ice and especially open sea increase the likelihood of drowning. Right now in the Summer, when the ice is still receding, they’re probably careful not to get too far from the land. (The minimum ice is achieved around mid September.)
Five days ago, media highlighted the observations that polar bears may swim up to 700 km without a pause.
For many reasons, I don’t really think that the polar bears are endangered or threatened. But if they were, I would be a support of actions to save them and my guess is that it couldn’t cost more than a billion of dollars (a fancy Mercedes for each polar bear would cost just about that). At any rate, it’s preposterous to use polar bears as an argument in the attempts to reduce the integrated GDP by trillions of dollars.
Note: Despite the story that follows, the modellers are still pushing for bigger, faster computers to predict cloimate on a smaller scale.
Source: C3 Headlines
Read here. Kevin Trenberth, like so many of his IPCC AGW - comrades recently, is finally admitting there exists many shortcomings and failures in the global warming “consensus” science. In Trenberth’s case, he body slams the climate models, which all the alarmist catastrophic predictions are based on.
Specifically, Trenberth takes issue with the climate models’ inadequacies in regards to precipitation. Such as:
“…all models contain large errors in precipitation simulations, both in terms of mean fields and their annual cycle, as well as their characteristics: the intensity, frequency, and duration of precipitation…”
“…relates to poor depiction of transient tropical disturbances, including easterly waves, Madden-Julian Oscillations, tropical storms, and hurricanes…”
“…confidence in model results for changes in extremes is tempered by the large scatter among the extremes in modeling today’s climate, especially in the tropics and subtropics…”
“…it appears that many, perhaps all, global climate and numerical weather prediction models and even many high-resolution regional models have a premature onset of convection and overly frequent precipitation with insufficient intensity,…”
“…model-simulated precipitation “occurs prematurely and too often, and with insufficient intensity, resulting in recycling that is too large…”
“…a lifetime of moisture in the atmosphere that is too short, which affects runoff and soil moisture…”
and finally, he has a NSS moment…"major challenges remain to improve model simulations of the hydrological cycle.”
Sooo, climates models can’t do precipitation (rain/snow/hail). That’s not much of a surprise to skeptics, plus it is widely known throughout the scientific world that climate models are also unable to do: water vapor, wind, clouds, ocean oscillations, atmospheric oscillations, ocean currents, polar ice sheets, positive feedback, negative feedback, climate sensitivity, aerosol impacts, submerged volcano impacts, solar/cosmic impacts, monsoons/hurricanes/typhoons, ocean heat, missing heat, missing CO2, minimum surface temperatures, maximum surface temperatures, regional warming/cooling, and of course, global warming, which is Trenberth’s personal brass ring travesty.
Clearly, the climate models themselves are travesties, which the IPCC’s lead dogs are finally starting to turn on. Although Trenberth shows some courage in publicly admitting a major (billions of dollars) climate science failure, he will likely resort to his true self in the near future to make amends to the green radical fringe.
The Australian press have done better (from their perspective) than last time at ignoring, or minimizing, Monckton’s press coverage.
That said, he has still got quite a lot of cover, and the debate appearance (which he won by the length of the straight) at the Press Club was priceless publicity for the cause. See:
Followed by Vaclav Klaus’appearance at the same venue yesterday, in which he completely wiped the floor with every reason that is given for Australia introducing a CO2 tax. From their body language and lame questions, it is clear that most in the audience were absolutely stunned and had no idea how to handle such a head-on, but beautifully low key, dismissal of their much-loved AGW shibboleth.
Priceless, but, of course, scarcely mentioned in the mainstream press.
Everyone should buy and read Vaclav Klaus’s book Blue Planet in Green Shackles. I was pleased to meet this courageous world leader in New York City and get a signed copy of his book. He gave a very moving address - go to the Heartland wesbite and look up ICCC I and watch for yourself.
Over the centuries, mankind has experienced tremendous rainfalls and massive floods, monster hurricanes and typhoons, destructive tornadoes, parched-earth droughts, strong gales, flash floods, great snowfalls and killer blizzards, lightning storms sent down from the heavens, blind dense fogs, freezing rain, sleet, great hail, and bone-chilling cold and even an occasional mudstorm or two and in-between, periods of warm sunshine and tranquility.
And we are still here. We are perhaps a little battered and bruised from the wear. But there is nothing new in the weather to fear because we have been there before. We have learned to cope. We have developed knowledge, skills and tools to reduce the effects of weather extremes.
Today, every time a heat wave or a great flood occurs (such as those in Russia and Pakistan this year), voices arise claiming this is more proof of man-made global warming. I wonder to myself if these voices are intentionally ignorant of historical weather extremes or just dishonest.
Early meteorologist and historians have documented weather for many centuries. Recently, I have compiled several of these accounts into “A Chronological Listing of Early Weather Events” and published this document on the Impact website.
This chronology covers the years 0 to 1900 A.D. (When downloading the file, please be a little patient. This is a master resource and the 6.5 MB file may take a few minutes to access.)
Why is a chronological listing of weather events of value? If one wishes to peer into the future, then a firm grasp of the past events is a key to that gateway. This is intrinsically true for the scientific underpinnings of weather and climate.
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A fascinating chronology that believes the Gorian, enviro and media claims that recent extremes are unprecedented. Even the Little Ice Age had brutal summer heat waves like we saw last year in Russia or this year in Texas. See many examples of brutal winters like the last 4 followed by significant floods, drought and heat waves in summer causing major crop and livestock issues and famine.
There is yet another article that documents that the role of humans in the climate system is much more than the radiative effect of CO2 and a few other gases (h/t to Marc Morano). This new study bolsters our conclusions in
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union
The Scientific American article, however, still misinterprets climate system heat changes (and climate change more generally) as dominated by added CO2. The new article is
Particles of sulfuric acid-injected by volcanoes or humans–have slowed the pace of climate change in the past decade.
My comment on this statement is that the ejection of aerosols from humans into the stratosphere IS part of human climate change. The implication from the term “pace” is that the radiative effect of CO2 and a few other greenhouse gases is climate change. It is NOT as we summarize in our EOS article
Although the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important, the human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first-order climate forcings, including, but not limited to, the human input of carbon dioxide (CO2). Most, if not all, of these human influences on regional and global climate will continue to be of concern during the coming decades.
Excerpts from the Scientific American text read [highlights added]
Despite significant pyrotechnics and air travel disruption last year, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull simply didn’t put that many aerosols into the stratosphere. In contrast, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, put 10 cubic kilometers of ash, gas and other materials into the sky, and cooled the planet for a year. Now, research suggests that for the past decade, such stratospheric aerosols - injected into the atmosphere by either recent volcanic eruptions or human activities such as coal burning - are slowing down global warming.
Combined with a decrease in atmospheric water vapor and a weaker sun due to the most recent solar cycle, the aerosol finding may explain why climate change has not been accelerating as fast as it did in the 1990s. The effect also illustrates one proposal for so-called geoengineering - the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment - that would use various means to create such sulfuric acid aerosols in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and thereby hopefully forestall catastrophic climate change.
But that points up another potential problem: if aerosol levels, whether natural or human-made, decline in the future, climate change could accelerate - and China is adding scrubbing technology to its coal-fired power plants to reduce SO2 emissions and thereby minimize acid rain. In effect, fixing acid rain could end up exacerbating global warming. China “could cause some decreases [in stratospheric aerosols] if that is the source,” Neely says, adding that growing SO2 emissions from India could also increase cooling if humans are the dominant cause of injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. On the other hand, “if some volcanoes that are large enough go off and if they are the dominant cause [of increasing aerosols], then we will probably see some increases” in cooling.
First, the statement that water vapor has been decreasing is remarkable. An increase in atmospheric water vapor is central to the hypothesis that the radiative effect of added CO2 would result in global warming that is significant in terms of effects on society. A lack of such an increase in water vapor is in contradiction to the 2007 IPCC model projections.
Second, the claim that “fixing acid rain could end up exacerbating global warming” somehow seems to suggest we should consider geoengineering that retains these aerosol emissions in order “to forestall catastrophic climate change”. This is an absurd claim. I wrote about this in my post
Health Benefits Of Air Quality Control Should Never Be Sacrificed By Delaying The Clean-Up Of Aerosol Emissions For Climate Reasons
I ended that post with the conclusion
Thus, when I see attempts to delay implementation of any air quality improvement, which will cost lives, in order to provide a climate effect (i.e. through the delay in reducing sulphate emissions), we need to recognize that the priorities of those making such climate recommendations are misplaced.
